I'm Lauren Orton, and this is one strange thing, the show where we searched the nation's news archives for stories that can't quite be explained.

Strangers, we've touched on this subject before in a manner of ways and for good reason.

The photograph? It holds a special place in the world of the paranormal.

If you see something absolutely bizarre in the year 2025, like, say, Bigfoot fighting mothman in the Denver airport,

then you can simply pull out your phone and snap a photo.

But before that, well, cameras were as good as it got.

In fact, when cameras and then camcorders became common

and then portable, regular people, just like you and me, were able to capture some amazing

things, possible UFOs and blurry cryptids running away through thickets, and for some

reason an excess of threatening clowns in places where they

have no business being. And because humans are, well, humans, we also got very good at faking

all of the above. Well, we guess that clowns are real, although sometimes we wish that they were not.

But our point is that cameras have been used in paranormal hoaxes for a very long time,

to present dinner plates as flying saucers, to help pass off cardboard cutouts as fairies

in the use of double exposures to create ghosts.

You know the drill.

Many formerly famous shots have since been outed as hoaxes,

like that 1934 Loch Ness Monster photo,

the one that turned out to be of a toy submarine.

As our photo capabilities advance, society has been able to disprove mysteries of the past,

even as new, more advanced entries into the annals of the strange pop up on social media

every single day. But there are a few vintage paranormal photos out there that have not yet been disproven.

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